Angela Reyes (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2003) is Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), and Doctoral Faculty in the Program in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches courses on English linguistic structures and histories, discourse theory and analysis, linguistic anthropology, and language in relation to notions of race, mixedness, and postcoloniality. She is a Faculty Advisory Board Member of the Asian American Studies Program and Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Hunter College.
Reyes works on theories of semiotics, racialization, and coloniality. Her research examines historical and contemporary formations of language and personhood in the U.S. and the Philippines. She has conducted three main ethnographic studies: a four-year study of Southeast Asian American teenagers in an after-school videomaking project at an Asian American community arts organization in Philadelphia; a one-year study of Korean American fifth graders in an Asian American "cram school" in New York City; and a two-year study of Filipino college students and professors at a private university in Manila. In this most recent work in the Philippines, Reyes examines conceptions of mixed race and mixed language that link elite social figures to elite linguistic registers. She explores how anxieties about nation, modernity, class, race, and language are traceable through the circulation of elite formations across colonial histories, college campuses, and social media. She is also in the preliminary stages of researching Riot Grrrl punk feminist zine archives from the early 1990s.
Reyes is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Advanced Research Collaborative Distinguished Fellowship/CUNY Graduate Center (2016), Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship/National Academy of Education (2009-2010), Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2006-2007), and Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for Minorities/National Research Council (2002-2003).
Selected Publications
Reyes, Angela (forthcoming) Postcolonial Semiotics. Annual Review of Anthropology 50.
Reyes, Angela (2021) Image into Sequence: Colonial Photography and the Invention of Filipino Evolution. Semiotic Review 9.
Wortham, Stanton and Angela Reyes (2021) Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event, 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge.
Reyes, Angela (2020a) Coloniality of Mixed Race and Mixed Language. In H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, pp. 186-206. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reyes, Angela (2020b) Real Fake Skin: Semiotics of Skin Lightening in the Philippines. Anthropological Quarterly 93(4): 653-677.
Alim, H. Samy, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity (2020a) The Field of Language and Race: A Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Race, Racism, and Racialization. In H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, pp. 1-21. New York: Oxford University Press.
Alim, H. Samy, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity (eds) (2020b) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reyes, Angela (2017a) Inventing postcolonial elites: Race, language, mix, excess. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27(2): 210-231.
Reyes, Angela (2017b) Ontology of fake: Discerning the Philippine elite. Signs and Society 5(S1): 100-127.
Wortham, Stanton and Angela Reyes (2015) Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event. New York: Routledge. *Awarded the 2016 Edward Sapir Book Prize, Society for Linguistic Anthropology.
Reyes, Angela (2014) Linguistic anthropology in 2013: Super-New-Big. American Anthropologist 116(2): 366-378.
Reyes, Angela (2013) Corporations are people: Emblematic scales of brand personification among Asian American youth. Language in Society 42(2): 163-185.
Reyes, Angela (2011) "Racist!": Metapragmatic regimentation of racist discourse by Asian American youth. Discourse and Society 22(4): 458-473.
Alim, H. Samy and Angela Reyes (2011) Complicating race: Articulating race across multiple social dimensions. Discourse and Society 22(4): 379-384.
Reyes, Angela and Adrienne Lo (eds) (2009) Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reyes, Angela (2007) Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Reyes, Angela (2005) Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(4): 509-532.
Reyes, Angela (2004) Asian American stereotypes as circulating resource. Pragmatics 14(2/3): 115-125.
Reyes, Angela (2002) "Are you losing your culture?": Poetics, indexicality, and Asian American identity. Discourse Studies 4(2): 183-199.